Darwin's Troubled Legacy

Darwin's Descent of Man was dominated by the theory of sexual selection, which Darwin used to explain peacock's tails, but also to argue that white people were as superior to black ones as men were to women. For Darwin and his contemporaries, inequality between races and the sexes was one of the facts that science had to explain. Ever since Darwin, biology has been used to support racial prejudice and gender inequality, but - happily - has also been used to challenge both in the 150 years s...